Stories

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Got command-line option parsing needs? There's a new kid on the block to consider instead of optionparser and it's called slop. The API is friendly and despite the gem's name, the DSL is... well... clean!

If you're using Cucumber with the Selenium driver for any of your tests, you may have encountered some clunkiness around interacting with Javascript alert and confirmation dialogs. Les Hill has posted a gist with a simple Cucumber step for asserting the content of those popups and clicking through them.

Using the typical static site generator tends to make one feel a little icky. There's usually a new DSL to learn, plus you get to clutter up your templates/views with all kinds of logic. Just feels wrong. Well check out Ace! You can write your site in Ruby and put all that logic in instance methods instead of the views.

How do you like your documentation? Online or off? Pretty and remote or local and command-liney? Take another look at bdoc which got some love lately. It indexes all your local gem docs and generates an HTML page so you can browse your docs locally via your favorite browser.

"Drink beer every Monday Wednesday and Friday at 8am and 6pm." Can your Ruby natural language parser make anything useful out of that? Well mine can. That's because I'm using nickel from Lou Zell. Lou just open-sourced nickel so check it out.

"Hey, that popular website I use every day just got hacked and look, there's my email address, phone number and home address all in plain text for everyone to see." Protect sensitive user data with Sean Huber's attr_encrypted gem. It makes it dead simple to encrypt attributes on Ruby objects.

It's big, it's stable, it's performant and it's here! JRuby 1.6.0 has been released. The team made Windows a primary supported platform with this release. It's great to see the Ruby community continue to embrace Windows users.